The American Telegrapher: a social history 1860-1900
Edwin Gabler
Rutgers University Press, 1988
ISBN 0-8135-1284-0 (hardbound), 0-8135-1285-9 (paperback)

I seem to read a lot of books which are at the same time both
interesting and tedious. This is one such book. Written by an
academic historian for reading by other academic historians, it is
long on footnotes, theories, and statistics and short on
flesh-and-blood storytelling; yet there is enough of the latter to
entertain the casual reader. Part I of this review is an attempt to
convey the general message of the book. Part II is for fun: a
selection of stories about the lives and times telegraphers a century
ago.

Part I

There are five chapters: a history of the Great Strike of 1883 as an
introduction to the world of the operators; a description of the
telegraph industry and especially Western Union; a social portrait of
the telegraphers; a study of women telegraphers; and a summary of the
labor movement and politics of telegraphers. An epilogue compares the
situation of telegraphers in the 1880s with that of the air traffic
controllers a hundred years later.

Telegraph and railroad companies following the Civil War represented
an entirely new kind of business, one in which the company's assets
are strung out for hundreds or thousands of miles with offices and
employees sprinkled along the lines. There were other affinities
between the two kinds of companies. Railroads used telegraphy to
support their own operations. Railroad rights-of-way were ideal
places to run telegraph lines, affording easy access for construction
and maintenance at a time when there were few roads. Telegraph
business was likely to be found in the same places the railroads
served. In many small towns the railroad station served as the public
telegraph office, as there was not enough telegraph business to
support an office for telegraph alone. Some railroads such as B & O
operated their own public telegraph businesses. (cf. Southern Pacific
a century later getting into the communications business.) Other
railroads had contract arrangements with the telegraph companies,
principally Western Union, for use of rights of way, interconnection
of circuits, and providing public telegraph service at the railroad
stations.

These new kinds of businesses needed a new kind of management. The
military became their model. Many of the top managers were alumni of
the Civil War military telegraph system. The companies had divisions,
rule books, general orders and special orders, and chains of command.
Management style was authoritarian. As is the case with some
companies today, the telegraph and railroad companies then were headed
by a mixture of people who knew the business and those who were
primarily financial wizards.

Telegraph operators represented the beginning of a new social class,
the lower-middle-class white-collar employees of large corporations.
Many were the children of farmers or of city blue-collar workers. A
great many were of Irish lineage. For all of these telegraphy offered
a step up the social ladder as well as an escape from hard physical
labor and city slums or rural isolation. Telegraphy was an occupation
open to women, although the majority of operators were male (and, like
the women, young and unmarried).

The national economy was fairly flat or even deflationary during the
period 1860-1890. Western Union profits rose handsomely throughout
the period. The operators did not share in this prosperity. For one
thing, there was an oversupply of them. First-class operators, who
could send and receive thirty to forty words per minute for hours on
end, were assigned to press and market reporting circuits. They could
command pay two to three times as great as that of the second-class
operators who made up the bulk of the force. Many operators learned
the craft by hanging around small railroad and telegraph offices;
others worked their way up from messenger and clerk jobs in larger
offices; still others were trained at a number of schools that sprang
up around the country. Most of the latter seem to have been
disreputable if not completely fraudulent, operating for profit and
promising high pay and mobility to rural youth. They were the
century-ago counterparts of the for-profit data processing schools of
our own times, the kind that advertised on matchbook covers and turned
out an oversupply of under-qualified graduates for high tuition fees.

Another financial problem for the telegraphers resulted from their new
social class. Telegraphers' pay was on a par with that of skilled
blue-collar workers; but their living expenses were greater. With the
move to suits and ties and shined shoes they felt a need to live in
middle-class housing, eat middle-class meals, and partake of
middle-class entertainments.

A few of the operators' perceptions of mistreatment by the companies
were more apparent than real. The 1840s through 1860s had been a
period when telegraphy was just getting started. Job opportunities
were abundant and promotions were rapid. As the industry matured
there were fewer spectacular success stories; telegraphy even seemed
to be a dead-end job. Other complaints had a more solid foundation.
Mergers of telegraph companies eliminated jobs. An economic downturn
in the 1870s caused Western Union to institute across-the-board salary
reductions, which were partially offset by monetary deflation.
Operators tended to move around a lot, which allowed the company to
hire cheaper replacements for those who left.

The first attempt of telegraph workers to organize was the National
Telegraphic Union of 1863. This was more of a mutual benefit society
than a labor union. It provided members with sickness and funeral
benefits and aimed to elevate the character of the members and promote
just and harmonious relations with employers. With conditions for
telegraphers growing worse after the Civil War the Telegraphers'
Protective League was formed in 1868 as a very different kind of
organization. It was a secret organization, because there was nothing
at the time to protect its members from the unbridled power of their
employers. Rather than relieving the sick and burying the dead it
proposed to raise the members to a financial position in which they
could take care of themselves.

The TPL felt strong enough by January, 1870 to risk a strike against
Western Union. It failed after about a week. There were just too
many operators seeking work, especially in the winter season; the
company was too strong; and the union was too poorly organized. The
operators' situation continued to deteriorate through the 1870s as
Western Union reduced wages, the number of would-be operators
increased, and the company absorbed its competitors. An attempt to
form another union in 1872 fizzled. In 1881 Jay Gould took over
Western Union, moving the company closer to being a true national
monopoly. By the summer of 1882 a number of regional labor
organizations put aside their differences to form the Brotherhood of
Telegraphers of the United States and Canada under the aegis of the
Knights of Labor. The Brotherhood, unlike its predecessors, accepted
the female operators as members.

In July, 1883 the Brotherhood presented a list of grievances to
Western Union and some other firms, hoping for at least a compromise
settlement and at worst a short strike. When the company made no
meaningful concessions the telegraphers walked out on July 19. At
first things looked good for the Brotherhood. About three fourths of
Western Union operators honored the strike. Public opinion was much
on the side of the telegraphers, at least to the extent that it was
against the side of Jay Gould and the W.U. monopoly. One competing
telegraph company settled quickly with the union; and another (B & O)
came close to, but never close enough. Union leaders worked hard to
keep the public on their side, urging the strikers to be models of
dignity and sobriety. The women were as valiant as the men, if not
more so, in upholding the strike.

Still, public sympathy did not feed the hungry; and the strike
dwindled until it was officially called off August 17. Operators
wishing to return to work had to sign a pledge of loyalty; those
considered militant unionists were blacklisted by the company. Still,
it appears the company was somewhat humbled by the power of the union
and made a few concessions to the operators. Failure of the strike
led to some ill feeling in the larger labor movement. The
telegraphers accused the Knights of insufficient support; the Knights
leadership felt the telegraphers had acted impulsively and without
sufficient preparation. The Brotherhood soon withdrew from the
Knights; and union activity reverted to local groups. Yet by 1885
there was a new organization, the Telegraphers' Union of America,
which rejoined the Knights in 1886. This seems to have faded away by
the early 1890s along with the Knights. Railroad telegraphers formed
the Order of Railway Telegraphers in 1886. An Order of Commercial
Telegraphers was formed in 1890 but never amounted to much, and allied
itself with the railway telegraphers in 1897-98. The next attempt to
form a union didn't happen until 1907, with the Commercial
Telegraphers' Union of America, which also suffered disaster in a
strike against Western Union.

Gabler concludes with a discussion of a number of labor and political
issues affecting telegraphers. One of the Brotherhood's demands had
been equal pay for equal work, male and female. This seems to have
been widely hailed as the Right Thing to do. I wonder whether the
male telegraphers supported the demand because it was right; or if
they supported it because they knew if the companies had to pay men
and women the same they would hire only men.

Some wanted a craft union, with membership limited to telegraphers,
with an apprenticeship program that would raise the quality of
operators while reducing their numbers. There was some interest in
government licensing of operators. Others favored an industrial
union, open to all Western Union employees. Some objected to the
secret fraternal rites that were a feature of the Knights of Labor;
Catholic workers were forbidden to become members of secret
organizations of any kind. The operators wanted to protect their new
middle-class image by being models of respectability and sobriety;
some of the linemen on the other hand had no scruples about cutting
wires to increase pressure on the companies during a strike. Some
felt that telegraphy should be a government monopoly, as was and still
is the norm in Europe. Some saw salvation in a worker-owned
cooperative, if they could only convince the banks or the government
to put up the money necessary to establish the system. Others sought
to improve the status of the working classes through political action;
quite a number were attracted to the United Labor Party of Henry
George. A hundred years later issues like these are still with us.

Part II

Dr. Gabler had access to a vast amount of material: census records,
archives of the telegraph companies, contemporary newspaper accounts,
magazines published for the edification and amusement of operators,
and even novels in which telegraphers were used as characters. The
footnotes and bibliography take up 48 pages. One page in the book is
an illustration of advertisements in a telegraphers' magazine of 1883.
They include a book on shorthand, a book of money-making secrets, a
book on the mysteries of love-making, a book on fortune telling, watch
charms with microscopic pictures, a book of advice to the unmarried, a
package of stationery, a book on politeness, a book of letters for all
occasions, playing cards with marked backs, a book of magic tricks, a
book on business, and a book on ballroom dancing. The theme is that
these appealed to working-class young adults who felt a need to learn
how to behave properly as members of the middle-class.

A number of telegraph operators rose to prominence. Thomas Edison and
Andrew Carnegie are the best known; Theodore N. Vail was a founder of
AT&T; others found success in business or politics; and almost all the
upper management of Western Union was drawn from the ranks of
operators. In 1885 there were five doctors and one dentist
moonlighting as telegraph operators -- maybe medicine and dentistry
didn't pay all that well in those days.

Thomas Edison, as a young telegrapher in the 1860s, would work a full
day and then stay in the office at night, listening to a press circuit
to get high speed code practice. Later he worked the Boston end of a
New York circuit with an operator named Jerry Borst. Operators formed
friendships with their counterparts at the other end of the wires.
The telegraph companies insisted that operators should work at
whatever circuits they were assigned. Edison and Borst conspired to
change three characters of the code, so that nobody else could copy
their transmissions and they could always work together. Cockroaches
were such a problem in the office that Edison devised a bug zapper to
protect his lunch from the little beasties.

Friendships over the wires were nourished during lulls in traffic by
exchanges of jokes and local news, and by checker games. Sometimes
love and courtship blossomed too. At other times operators were rude
to one another. On one occasion two operators got so angry at each
other that they arranged to meet at a town halfway between their posts
and settle the matter with fists at 1:00 AM. "Salting" (sending too
fast for the receiving operator) was a frequent source of irritation.
Salting was also part of the common practice of hazing new operators.

Operators frequently got privileges, such as free passes to theaters
and on trains. With the chronic oversupply it was common for
operators to travel back and forth across the country looking for
work, or for better conditions. Operators didn't get vacations, paid
or otherwise; but in the summer months telegraph offices would open in
the resort towns where the rich took their vacations, and operators
could find work there.

In 1883 Western Union employed 444 telegraphers in New York City, 96
in Boston, 88 in St. Louis, and 83 in Chicago. This seems to support
a conjecture of mine that W.U. was weakened all its life by
overattention to serving New York City and insufficient effort to
develop the business in other parts of the country.

There was friction between the city operators and the rural operators.
The city operators were proud of their skills, and wanted to move the
traffic. They resented they way country operators would frequently
interrupt transmissions. The country operators, usually working in
railroad depots, countered that telegraphy was but a small part of
their duties. They had to answer questions from the public, sell
tickets, meet trains, tend switches and signals, handle freight, and
keep the lamps burning. They commonly worked shifts as long as twelve
or even sixteen hours.

Development of duplex and then quadruplex operation greatly increased
the pressure on operators, as the receiving operators could not
interrupt the senders. Gender stereotyping held that only male
operators had the stamina to handle these heavily-loaded circuits; yet
the book cites a number of examples of women who worked these
circuits. Women were consistently paid less than men. The companies
were well aware that women were a bargain compared with men, and
continually tried to replace men with women.

Nellie Welch had full charge of the telegraph office in Point Arena,
California in 1886. She was eleven years old.

Western Union and the Cooper Union Institute in 1869 jointly started a
free eight-month telegraphy course for women. It lasted through the
early 1890s, turning out about 80 graduates a year. They would first
take non-paying jobs assisting regular operators, and then be hired as
operators on lightly loaded city circuits. This school was much
despised by men for its contribution to the oversupply problem,
thought it probably hurt the opportunities for women more than those
for men.

Beginner and less-skilled operators were called "plugs" or "hams."
(Note the endless controversy over the origin of the term "ham" for
amateur radio operators.) The schools that turned out these operators
were called "plug factories."

Craft magazines sought to shame operators who taught telegraphy. They
were urged to pass on the secrets of Morse only to brothers, sisters,
sons, and daughters. At least one railroad operator quit his job
rather than cooperate with a student placed with him by the company.

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[Moderator's Note: My thanks for this very interesting article.
Digest readers are encouraged to send book reviews and other special
articles like this to Telecom for distribution on the net. PAT]

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: (in 2005) Another article about Nellie
Welch (the 11 year old in 1886 who operated the telegraph office) told
of how she was _very quick_ at sending and recieving messages; how in
her 'spare time' she also wrote and sold stage coach tickets and
tended to the horses. That particular combination telegraph office/
stage coach 'way station' was also a place where the stage coach
drivers would exchange their horses for a fresh team of horses to
continue their journey. Nellie would unhitch the team of horses,
take them in the stable to be fed, watered and 'bedded down' until
the animals started their trip back to where they came from the next
day. Then she would take a fresh team out, hook them to the stage
coach. That was also a change place for the stage coach drivers,
who sometimes stayed there overnight while some other driver took the
stage coach on to wherever. Assisted by her mother and her invalid
father, she was the principal 'bread winner' in the little family. PAT]